Six directors on their favorite fed-up female characters
This Oscar season, we're getting half a dozen movies about women fighting for control in their lives. The directors behind them tell us about the characters who inspire their own fight.
offline
This article is part of Harper’s Bazaar’s Great Motivators package, highlighting the essential voices that are keeping us inspired in 2024.
As Oscars season ramps up, it’s clear that there’s a certain feeling in the air—or, rather, onscreen. Amid a particularly exciting slate of films being released through the end of the year, a handful stand out for the shared themes they make their focus: six movies, directed by women, centring women at challenging inflection points in their lives.
The characters themselves could not be more different. There’s an ageing star whose last grasp at youth pulls her into a body-horror nightmare, a high-powered exec risking it all on an affair with an intern, a Vegas showgirl in her last hurrah, a boxer on the come-up, a Mumbai nurse just trying to keep it together, and a woman who thinks she’s turning into a dog.
Some of the films are phantasmagorical, others quiet and grounded. Some are sexy, some thrilling, some poignant. But despite their wildly different approaches in exploring women’s fulfilment, restlessness, and self-discovery, they all somehow manage to hit the same nerve. These women are fed up, and they’re not going to take it anymore as they fight to claim control over their lives.
We asked the directors behind these films to tell us about their own favourite fed-up characters—in movies and theatre and literature—and how they inspire them to shout their own stories from the rooftops.
The Director: Coralie Fargeat, the French director behind the 2017 thriller Revenge. A play on movies like those in the hypermasculine Rambo franchise, Revenge followed a rape survivor who reaps—what’s the word?—revenge on her assailants. The movie was acclaimed for its subversion of the male gaze and the cinematic tropes it engendered.
The Movie: The Substance, in theaters now. Fargeat’s follow-up stars Demi Moore as a maven of aerobic-workout TV who gets unceremoniously dumped by her network after she turns 50. Desperate to reclaim her youth—and, she hopes, all the professional and personal trappings that come with it—she begins an experimental mail-order treatment called “The Substance.” Enter Margaret Qualley—literally, entering the frame by crawling out of her older cohort’s body. What follows is a body-horror odyssey that has disgusted and enthralled audiences to become the most talked about film of awards season.
The Inspiration: “I was inspired by and would highly recommend The Nightingale by Jennifer Kent, which portrays the extreme violence that women have to face in the world and how power dynamics can crush women and everyone else who is not part of the dominating group.”
The Director: Gia Coppola started her career shooting shorts for the likes of Rodarte, DVF, and Opening Ceremony, so it’s not a surprise that she has an eye for style. She’s since directed two features: 2013’s Palo Alto and 2020’s Mainstream. The third-generation Coppola has proven herself to have a flair all her own.
The Movie: The Last Showgirl, in theaters on December 13. In a role that Pamela Anderson says “I’ve been waiting for my entire career,” she plays a Las Vegas showgirl wrestling with what to do after the act she’s dedicated her life and career to suddenly announces it will shut down. Together, Coppola and Anderson create something that will stick in the heart of anyone who’s ever made sacrifices for the thing they love, even when nobody else sees something worth making those sacrifices for.
The Inspiration: “I didn’t draw from other characters for The Last Showgirl. I don’t think—that is, until recently—movies broached the subject of our culture’s ageism toward women or the systemic struggle of working mothers. If they did, the female characters were usually villainised or not taken seriously.
“Pamela and the women surrounding me were my north star for this film. It’s a story we commiserated on. Seeing Pamela’s documentary, where she wore no makeup and spoke so honestly and vulnerably about her life experience—I don’t believe it gets any more authentic than her. It was really important to me to make this movie intimately, like a Cassavetes film. We spoke about Gena Rowlands in Woman Under the Influence. I love when she asks for the time and then sticks her tongue out at people. Pamela embodied some of that for Last Showgirl.”
The Director: Halina Reijn, the celebrated Dutch actress who turned to directing with the 2019 drama Instinct, starring Game of Thrones’s Carice van Houten. She then directed the pitch-perfect 2022 dark comedy slasher Bodies Bodies Bodies.
The Movie: Babygirl, in theaters on December 25. The erotic thriller stars Nicole Kidman as a high-powered executive who finds herself drawn into an affair with an intern played by Harris Dickinson. The film is in part Reijn in conversation with the erotic thrillers of the 1980s and 1990s, in which women’s sexuality and sexual desire was a knife, a reason for her to get her comeuppance by the time the credits rolled. But even in a post-#MeToo world where office power dynamics are an especially hot topic, Babygirl manages to be funny and sexy and tense and nuanced in ways that feel like it’s walking a miraculous tightwire act. And that only adds to the thrill of the viewing experience.
The Inspiration: “For the first 20 years of my working life, I was an actress in theatre. Over those two decades on stage, I had the privilege of playing many of theatre’s most iconic women in many of the ‘classics’—and I think every single one of them was fed up. Literally. Ophelia, my first role, drowns herself. Hedda Gabler shoots herself to avoid a scandal. Cocteau has ‘Elle’ strangle herself with a phone cord. And Wedekind’s Lulu is killed by Jack the Ripper. Maria Stuart is beheaded, and in Chekhov’s The Seagull, Nina loses her mind after being impregnated and then rejected by Trigorin.
“I love every single one of these characters; they shaped me and continue to live inside me, whether I like it or not. But for the men who wrote these famous stories, a woman who wants to break free has no other choice than to go mad, commit suicide, or be killed for her rebellion. My favourite role was Nora, who made the audience gasp every night when she walked out of her Doll’s House toward freedom. Because even in modern times, a woman choosing liberation—and leaving her family behind—is shocking. And unlike the others, Nora got to live to sit in the discomfort and joy and guilt and pleasure of choosing her own path.
“Today, I am so grateful for The Piano, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Thirteen, Lost in Translation, Titane, and so many more. For films that show what happens when you give a woman control over her own narrative. Now a woman can be the architect of her own story, revealing the good, the bad, and the grey in between—all in her own words. That is the act of making the film itself a step toward true liberation.”
The Director: Marielle Heller, the writer-director behind 2015’s The Diary of a Teenage Girl, and the director of Can You Ever Forgive Me?, an adaptation of Lee Israel’s confessional memoir, and the Mr. Rogers biopic A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood.
The Movie: Nightbitch, in theaters on December 6. Based on Rachel Yoder’s modern magic-realist novel, the adaptation stars Amy Adams as a new stay-at-home mother who believes she’s begun to transform into a dog at night. It’s both a feminist fable and a treatise on the ways cultural conversation around motherhood yields anger, alienation, and anxiety.
The Inspiration: “One of the themes of Nighbitch is a woman’s loss of identity as she shifts from being a young woman into a middle-aged woman: becoming a mother, going through perimenopause, and the sort of ‘I don’t give a fuck’-ness that comes about at that time of life. Which, for very obvious reasons, has been interesting to me because I am in that exact phase in my own life. I don’t know if it’s the type of thing where once you buy a car, you start to see that type of car everywhere, but because I have been making a movie that’s very much about a fed-up woman who is grappling with her new domestic role, the gendered division of labour, and general gender stereotypes, I have also started to see all of that in the different media I’m consuming. A book I recently read—and I feel like every woman I know my age has been reading—is Miranda July’s All Fours, which really deftly explores this phase of life and the internal changes that happen during this phase. I found it to be such a beautiful portrait that challenges the expectations of what women are expected to be as they age.”
The Director: Payal Kapadia, the Indian director who made her feature debut in 2021 with the acclaimed documentary A Night of Knowing Nothing, which explores the day-to-day implications of caste through the relationship between university students in India.
The Movie: All We Imagine as Light, in theaters on November 15. Kapadia’s first fictional feature follows two nurses in Mumbai as they navigate their friendship amid incursions from the men in their lives and the social and economic realities of their lives. The film won the prestigious Grand Prix award at this year’s Cannes Film Festival and has begun awards season with a nomination for Best International Feature Film at the Gotham Awards.
The Inspiration: “Forugh Farrokhzad was a feminist poet from Iran. While she is not a ‘character’ in the traditional sense, she often positioned herself as the protagonist in her work. I admire deeply Farrokhzad’s poetry and how she wrote about feminine desire. Her act of writing these poems was a resistance in themselves. She died at the tragically young age of 32, but she left behind an incredible body of work that still inspires young women.”
The Director: Rachel Morrison, the cinematographer of Fruitvale Station, Dope, Black Panther, and several specials with none other than Oprah herself.
The Movie: The Fire Inside, in theaters on December 25. Morrison’s directorial feature, written by Barry Jenkins, stars Ryan Destiny as boxer Claressa “T-Rex” Shields on her road to winning gold at the 2012 Summer Olympics. It’s a propulsive look at an athlete triumphing over trauma.
The Inspiration: “One of my all-time favourite female badasses is Marge in Fargo, played by Frances McDormand. I love that she is fearless and no-bullshit. And at six months pregnant, she defies every expectation of your typical chief of police onscreen. I appreciate that she is unabashedly herself and manages to balance muscle and grit with compassion and impending motherhood—all this plus a healthy dose of quick wit and sass!”
Lead image credit: The directors
Also read: A powerhouse: Hansal Mehta on 'The Buckingham Murders' and how he works
Read more!
Advertisement